One of the most useful databases, which gathers comprehensive data on proteomes of several organisms, including yeast and human, will require a paid subscription as of June 1st of this year (2002).

Incyte Genomics plans to charge $2000 US per year per laboratory to access the library. A laboratory is defined to be ``a single Principal Investigator, his/her postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and technical support (usually 5-8 individuals).'' According to information provided, ``larger labs, depending on their size, may be required to purchase multiple subscriptions.''

Charging the fee of $2000 US will simply mean cessation of its use for thousands of laboratories, mainly from poor countries, unfortunately, also including most of the European laboratories.

Incyte Genomics seems to take seriously its slogan: ``Integrating the Science and Business of Genomics.''

Private companies take granted that they have free access to public research achievements, but once they use it to find something out, it's immediately restricted. It was so much useful database... If you know about any initiative, please, post it here...

What a total bunch of cowboys. When proteome.com was established, many accademics contributed on the understanding that this would be a free of cost free for all to use system and therefore forward scientific understanding and discovery.
I know many American labs are planning on boycotting the service (whether they go through with it though...) My lab certainly can't afford the fee. Can I get the information I have contributed to proteome removed? Or charge Incyte for it's use...??!!?

As a graduate student about to start the writing up process, the construction of my thesis will be much difficult with out this valuable database. I guess I need to try and get as much done as possible before June 1st. I wonder how much paper it would take to print of the whole of the pombePD??!!!

Well, I guess they'll block your access, when they find you are trying to do that. It happened to us, when we've been downloading "a lot" of information (we were analyzing DNA array results) they blocked our IP, and we had to ask them for access and explain why we were doing so much downloads. Now they'll be twice as carefull, I think.

Private companies take granted that they have free access to public research achievements, but once they use it to find something out, it's immediately restricted. It was so much useful database... If you know about any initiative, please, post it here...

Friends-
I haver a connection with Proteome/Incyte who intends to make sure that these comments are read. While many of us are disappointed in this decision, we need to try and be constructive to help Incyte decide how to best help us academics. If you have suggestions about how to lessen this impact, post them here. For example, it would be great if you could buy access to one database for substantially less money than access to all the databases, or perhaps if you could buy access for 24 hours.
I am hoping for a good turnout here, and to try and convince Incyte that this is a mistake that will damage many labs.

I am the pricipal investigator of a small academic lab (3 grad students and a postdoc) with not nearly enough research funding to pay $2000/year for a Proteome subscription.
I am suprised that it is legal for Incyte to resell the copyrighted data that we have generated. I have in fact contributed missing data myself in the past to WormPD, when it was publicly available.
It seems like Incyte will be creating a public relations fiasco by charging academic labs for use.
The institutional pricing structure will certainly need to be more explicit (the same way as journals charge for institutional use, for example) for academic libraries to be even capable of following up on it.